Optical characterization of coconut oil from 600 nm to 1600 nm for use as a tissue phantom

Optical phantoms are widely used to characterize diffuse optical setups and data analysis methods for in vivo/ex vivo measurements. Coconut oil is an interesting compound to use in phantoms, because it could be used to model lipidic tissues, such as the one in breast tissue. In the paper associated to this dataset, we measure the absorption and scattering spectra of coconut oil from 600 to 1600 nm, encompassing the so-called "therapeutic window". To cover the entire range, we exploit a supercontinuum pulsed laser and a superconducting nanowire single photon detector operating in the time domain. Finally, we demonstrate the use of a homogeneous coconut oil phantom to characterize a hyperspectral continuous-wave setup. The attached file cointains 2 datasets. The “data assessment” dataset contains the absorption and scattering spectra acquired using time-resolved diffuse optical spectroscopy between 600 and 1600 nm for 15 coconut-oil phantoms, consisting of 3 brands and 5 samples per brand. Each of the 15 phantoms was measured on 4 different days over the course of a week. The “data validation” dataset contains the results obtained by analyzing continuous-wave hyperspectral imaging data from a new phantom, fabricated using a fourth coconut-oil brand. The analysis employed the average absorption spectrum derived from the previous dataset. The dataset reports the estimated coconut and water fractions, along with the scattering amplitude and slope parameters, extracted from 324 pixels of the same phantom measured on three different days over the course of a month.